The Voynich Ninja

I remember reading a long time ago (forgotten where and who posted) that the voynich text seems to have 2 shapes at the core of many of its glyphs.  These are the slanted i, and the c shape (e in EVA).  Basically, quite a few of the other characters can be created by starting from these two shapes, and expanding on them somehow.  I can’t remember who posted this, or which website I’d read it on, but for some reason it stuck with me.
 
I had another look into it this week, and made an observation I hadn’t noticed before.  Presumably others have noticed this way quicker than me, but I wanted to share my thoughts, and ask the more experienced collective their thoughts.
 
My thoughts are that, not only do a lot of the glyphs start with either a  i  or a  e (referred to as “i” or “c” now for simplification), they seem to also have a twin glyph, which appears to be the exact same shape, apart from having the “i” or “c” as their ‘starting point’.
 
I have made a table to demonstrate what I mean, which is below.  As you can see, I have put the “c” glyphs on the left and the “i” glyphs on the right.

[attachment=5236]
 
At the bottom of the table, I have also included the gallows glyphs.  The reason for this is that, while not made from the “c” and “i” shapes like the rest of the glyphs, they still definitely have a distinctive ‘twin’ with which they can be linked.  The only difference between the gallows is at the top left of the vertical stick, where on the left hand column the stroke moves backward first, forming a sort of “mini c” , and on the right column, the stroke moves immediately to the right, which could almost be a small “i”…
… hang on…
Nah… There can’t be anything in that, can there?
 
Anyway, besides that, we still have several shapes which are unaccounted for.  O should certainly be a candidate for the “c” column, as should the bridged c’s, I should imagine.  
 
But my main point for writing this is the following question, which I wanted to put to everyone.  Do you think the person who designed the voynich text deliberately chose shapes (pre-existing latin letters or otherwise) which had a twinned shape?  In which case, shouldn’t ALL voynich glyphs have a twin?  And if so, how do we group the remaining shapes?  There seems to be far too many glyphs with “c” at the root compared with “i”  What about the glyphs that DONT have a twin.  Are these intermediaries?
 
It would be interesting if the shapes were chosen in this way based on some kind of unknown rules of their alphabet or pronunciation.  Perhaps if this is a cypher text (and I’m on the fence about whether it is or not), the twin glyphs had the same value, but one was a negative value (or had to be treated/decoded opposite to its counterpart)?  Or when laid out on a wheel, if the “c” glyph was on one side of the perimeter and the twin glyph fell exactly opposite?

NONE of which helps us decipher the text I know.
 
I have a few other ideas which I’m happy to be talked down from.  On the diagram I made, on the right of the main column I have grouped some other glyphs and attempted to ‘twin’ these also.  The “g” shape and “x” shaped glyphs I grouped together because they are both drawn by adding a roughly vertical line from their upper edge, which falls below the main text line, and slightly to the left.  And what about the “a”? Why did I position this as twinned to the “bridged c” glyph in the “i” column?  Well, I speculated that perhaps the “a” is made by adding a c shape onto the front of the “i”.  In order to create a twin of this shape, the text designer couldn’t have simply put a c on the front of a pre-existing “c”, or it would have looked like two “c” glyphs back to back.  So instead, the scribe draws a line over the top of the two, showing that this is to be treated as one glyph.
 
Well, there you have it.  That’s my “what if” for the time being.  I am very happy for people to say it’s silly, and it certainly has a lot of holes.  I haven’t accounted for O and 4 and a few other minor glyphs, simply because I couldn’t decide how to ‘twin’ them.  But that’s my idea for the time being.  Twins.  What does everyone think?
 

Hi Klingmann,
You're thinking of Brian Cham's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

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In short, there's certainly a level of design to the script, with glyphs having visual relationships which might indicate relationships in their meaning.

My investigations are in the illustrations, not the language. It can be shown in the VMs zodiac sequence that a simple pattern of pairing is found in the medallions of the first five houses. By hook and by crook, there are pairs and pairs of pairs in these medallions. There are pairs of tub patterns. A pair of Stolfi's markers. A pair of papelonny patterns.

Any illustrated item, given ambiguous interpretation, might point in whatever direction. Having two items indicating provenance in the same direction, a pairing - or twins- if you will, serves to mutually re-enforce the apparent validity of further inquiry.

I believe this intentional use of pairing derives from the traditional laws of Deuteronomy (17:6 and 19:15). It's the part about the establishment of truth requiring at least two witnesses. And it is clearly invoked twice. It would and does indicate that interesting discoveries can be found in the VMs use of illustrative pairing.

Pairing follows two paths in the VMs zodiac sequence: astrology and heraldry. As a significant characteristic of the illustrations, why wouldn't it apply to language as well? If there is meaning to be found in the language, after all thus far, then the VMs author is some serious pattern-junkie as the illustrations suggest.

Thanks for the responses everyone!

David, thanks for the link to Brian Chams website.  I knew I'd read the concept before someone, but forgot it was called the curve-line system, so couldn't search for it!  Only having a vague memory to go on, I chose which glyphs acted as curves or lines myself, and was thrilled to see that Brian and I had come to the same conclusion regarding the link between the "EVA y" and "EVA l" glyphs (sorry for not inserting the real voynich here - for some reason I can't change font despite having EVA installed on my PC and clicking the font from the menu).

I think where I differed most was my classification of "EVA a" glyph - which Brian uses as an intermediary but which I put in the "EVA i" (as explained in the OP).  This was so that I could use "EVA ce" as its twin.  Also, I twinned the gallows together, and using the stroke leading to the right "tail modifier" as Brian calls them, grouped them into the "EVA e" and "EVA i" columns as well.  Something I didn't mention in my OP, but I found that the "tail modifier" which is applied to the "EVA g" and "EVA d" characters can also be used to form the gallows character, if you start by from drawing the left vertical line and make the initial "mini EVA e/EVA i" first.  (Slightly different ending shape, to allow the formation of the 2nd vertical line, but extremely similar)

Personally, I still think there is a lot of exploration still possible with the curve line insofar as character development is concerned.  Regarding the anomolies, which Brian calls "non conforming" vords - another possible reason for these is maybe that these vords may be the result of two smaller words becoming joined, not needing a space between them, to form a longer word. For example,  think of the English word Bedroom. Bed and Room are two seperate words, which in the voynich language may follow the curve line system perfectly, but when joined, the curve line is broken because the word 'bed' still needs to end with a line (its original pronunciation has not changed) and 'room' still needs to start with a curve (again, unchanged), but when the word bedroom (now one word) is written in voynich, it destroys the curve line, because it is a joining of these two individual patterns. 
Now, that doesn't mean I believe the voynich is plain text or not, (and I highly doubt if 'bedroom' is in the text!!) but what I'm saying is that, if smaller concepts (bed and room) in the voynich already have a voynich vord, and these smaller words need to be joined to make a bigger vord (either in plain text or coded), the scribe may have chosen to group the two concepts together, rather than creating a new vord, thus breaking his curve line pattern.

To Emma and R. Sale, thanks also to you for making other points which also link well to my OP.  The gallows are certainly the characters which cause the most debate.  I actually have another idea as to how these glyphs might fit into the text, if someone were to try and make voynich pronounceable, (or in other words, if you could just read the language out loud... I'm sure there's a word for this but I can't think of it.  Some good I'm going to be solving voynich if I can't even find the right English words to use!)  But maybe this is a topic for another post.  It certainly is interesting also that there is a kind of twinning effect happening in the images as R. Sale suggests.  Lately, I have become so engrossed with the text that I've neglected the images.  I will have to go back and look at them some more with twins in mind.

Finally, in terms of the curve line system, I was dismayed to find that, despite Brian posting about it some years ago on here, it only got limited response!  My post has got more feedback than his did, which is extremely saddening, as mines just some random cobbled together ideas, whereas he has really researched the issue and come back with some really great statistics.  I honestly believe there is more to the CLS than has been explored.  I'd certainly follow closely if others were to continue this line of attack...

Gavin

Hi JKP,

was there any kind of rules as to what letters were missing, or how many were missing, when using the macron in Latin? Or was it more determined by the choice of the scribe, or the word or phrase in question?

@ Klingmann

There are more or less stringent rules, whih get looser in the 15th. c.
 
The easiest approach to this is the English Wikipedia article Scribal abbreviations or its German ounterpart, if you want more, read the introduction to Cappelli, Dizionario di Abbreviature (online) or Bernhard Bischoff, Paläographie

I agree with what Helmut said.

Also, one of the things I noticed is that the differences between the shapes of certain macrons tended to become less distinct as time wore on. The straight macron (a simple line above the word) became more universal by the mid-15th century. If I can find time on the weekend, I'll post some examples of the different but more common shapes. I'm sorry I simply can't do it now.